Comparing and contrasting disparate historical figures can easily be artificial, misleading, even gimmicky. Steven Levingston, however, has walked this tightrope magnificently. In his important new book, Kennedy and King, the rest of us get an unusual chance to study each leader in part through the other over a tumultuous, pivotal eight-year period. As is always the case with major contributions to our understanding, Levingston’s is grounded in diligent research and detail ... Levingston’s account of Birmingham, which chronicles the city’s impact on each protagonist, is simply riveting. He is especially illuminating in following Kennedy’s final steps when his attorney general brother nudged him to become 'the nation’s first civil rights President.'
Levingston's writing on King is unfailingly perceptive and eloquent, looking clearly at his flaws (mainly vanity, and a penchant for histrionics that's endemic to Southern preachers, even Boston University-educated ones) while conveying on every page his greatness. The main problem with the book is that its story is lopsided: in these pages, King has both the vision and the courage to pursue it in the face of all obstacles. Kennedy, on the other hand, presents an imbalance not even the most sympathetic writer can fully right ... Levingston is aware of this uneasy dialectic, of course, and he treats it with the complexity that it deserves. His version of JFK is a man whose pragmatics are constantly at war with his idealism, and thanks to Levingston's impressive narrative skills, the spectacle of this president confronting the most divisive issue of his day is consistently fascinating.
Levingston writes with passion and flair. If these pages don’t rouse you, call your doctor ... There are places where Levingston the writer (displaying the occupational weaknesses for stark contrasts and sudden twists of drama) gets the better of Levingston the historian ... Levingston’s frame does not fit, but he is too good a writer to get in the way of his history for long. Kennedy and King will most likely leave readers thinking that what is needed today is not more leaders, a few men and women shaping our destiny, but more followers.
In his insightful and well-crafted Kennedy and King, Steven Levingston attempts to bring greater clarity to these questions, illuminating the stories of both men and their complicated relationship during a tumultuous era ... The arc of Kennedy’s moral evolution as presented by Mr. Levingston is perhaps a bit too pat. Kennedy’s eventual (though still tempered) embrace of the black freedom struggle may have been a legitimate moral conversion spurred by King and others, or it may have been a political calculation based on the idea that the era of Southern segregationists was waning. The full picture is surely more complicated and less knowable than Mr. Levingston suggests ... At a time when cynicism about our political system abounds, Mr. Levingston’s story reminds us that outsiders can prod those in power toward progress and reform.
This is the history of Great Men: the triumphal history of victors. It is also the history of two very naughty men, though Levingston only occasionally alludes to the two men’s personal vices ... Kennedy and King reduces morality to obvious indignity, emotion to family life, and everything else to politics ... Levingston names the goal to which King is committed, and which Kennedy eventually embraces, 'black justice.' This locution feels out of place in a book whose style is largely that of a bygone era when the liberal, Coastal consensus (of white men) was fully self-confident.
Levingston here recounts the story of how those cruelly disappointed hopes surged anew just five months later when President Kennedy delivered a stirring speech urging Congress to pass civil rights legislation conferring full citizenship on the nation’s largest minority group ... A riveting episode in American history.
...a comprehensive examination of the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr ... Although Levingston insists that Kennedy was 'a man of intellect and compassion,' some evidence he presents supports the idea that the Kennedy brothers saw civil rights as the 'moral issue' that would burnish the president’s image. A stronger argument would have helped to reconcile this contradiction, which persists throughout the book.
Levingston comprehensively evaluates the antagonistic interplay of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy during the civil rights movement ... Students of the movement will appreciate Levingston’s portrayals of two key behind-the-scenes movers and shakers: Harry Belafonte, the entertainer who served as the intermediary between the pastor and the politician, and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, whose early support of King was pivotal in the pastor’s triumphal moving of the president from political agnosticism to action, which led to President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
